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[jdiddleymspot]

My usual method of play is to find a nice site. Not too savage, plenty of flux stone and a bit of soil and dig out a simple fortress, not paying too much attention to design. After I get some bedrooms, a meeting/dining hall, woodworker's, mason's and mechanic's workshop done, I move onto a little bit of defenses, nothing too fancy, just some stonefall traps and a dog chained to the main entrance if I brought a rope. Usually by this time I also have a kitchen and butcher's shop up and running, a hunter or fisherman out to hunt and perhaps some basic crafting shops to satisfy the first trade. I then move onto a farm and brewery. Thing is, things get way too complicated quickly. I get a few extra immigrants and I don't know what to do with them, I loose focus and I then have about 15 dwarves just carrying out hauling duties. After this, I lose hope and normally start again, falling quickly into the same method. I never usually get to the first siege.

How do you go about setting up your fortresses?

[silantrath]

I try to let the immigrants do whatever they're already good at, and only keep one of each skill type unless its something I know I'll need more of (miners). That usually means I end up with tons of haulers standing around the well (Urist McGlassmaker doesn't usually have much actual work to do) but I ignore the ~40+ idlers for two reasons; I know that whenever I need to empty a newly dug out area of stone, it will happen quickly, and if I need to produce something for a moody dwarf there's always someone to take care of it, right away. (sometimes I have to put an end to a party, but that's no big deal) It also means it's easier to keep those non-rotting vermin corpses piled up in my trash-compactor room. In the end, I keep a food chain running round the clock, miners at the ready for expansion/expeditions, woodworkers and masons ready to follow up the miners' expansion work, and that's pretty much all I concentrate on until something fun happens. If nothing fun happens for a while and things slow down, I usually spend a little time creating some mechanism that doesn't come standard in all my forts, like a fountain or craft production area, or adamantine military equipment. This is usually about the time I find that I've designed something wrong, or I realize there is a way for goblins to actually get on top of my courtyard wall and shoot in, or some other calamity befalls and I start over.

[Dakk]

I have a soft spot in me heart for evil glaciers, but I have to do some serious tweaking on the embark screen to survive till migrants arrive, plus I also bring alot of logs to make beds and some buckets. I almost aways exchange the anvil for extra skills and food.

[Fikes]

I think you are simply falling in to the old elven trap of caring too much. Just let your dwarfs do what ever, it is okay to have a bunch doing nothing, so long as you are A) building a military (includes weapons and armor) and B) making beer.

I generally dump every stone from the important areas of my fortress so it looks cleaner... this keeps lots of hauler dwarves very busy. When my fortress is good and stable I start digging down, way down. I am debating about moving everything deep underground now and walling off the entrance, or splitting my fotress up into two levels, think of how much easier pathfinding would be!

Digging deeper and magma mega projects can solve any problem, including bordem.

[Footkerchief]

Lower your population cap in init.txt and/or throw all your migrants in the military.

[Lord Snow]

you tell me.

In a matter of a year and a half, my fort has grown from 70 half-decent integrated dwarves to a 140 dwarf monstrosity with baron, baroness, tax collector and mayor all mandating the hell out of me while i'm still trying to figure out how i can expand my kitchen/still etc to larger scale without ruining the whole nice little design.

Not to mention that i have not the slightest idea which of those dwarves are already set for a job and which are new. They just came to fast, before any of the jobs assigned made my dwarves change profession name... Well. guess thats what i get for being too lazy to assign 140 Custom nicknames/professions.

If anybody has a hint on how i could improve situations like this, without atom-smashing 3/4rds of all my immigration in the next fort i'd be most grateful
I'm pretty sure this one is doomed come to first hammering for failed mandate, 45 guys are legendary demigods and friends to half the fort. Not that it's much good, i pretty much went in hoping for a cliff and got 2-3 tile spaced ramps instead (and nothing in terms of HFS on the site; old version)

[Hyndis]

you tell me.

In a matter of a year and a half, my fort has grown from 70 half-decent integrated dwarves to a 140 dwarf monstrosity with baron, baroness, tax collector and mayor all mandating the hell out of me while i'm still trying to figure out how i can expand my kitchen/still etc to larger scale without ruining the whole nice little design.

Not to mention that i have not the slightest idea which of those dwarves are already set for a job and which are new. They just came to fast, before any of the jobs assigned made my dwarves change profession name... Well. guess thats what i get for being too lazy to assign 140 Custom nicknames/professions.

If anybody has a hint on how i could improve situations like this, without atom-smashing 3/4rds of all my immigration in the next fort i'd be most grateful
I'm pretty sure this one is doomed come to first hammering for failed mandate, 45 guys are legendary demigods and friends to half the fort. Not that it's much good, i pretty much went in hoping for a cliff and got 2-3 tile spaced ramps instead (and nothing in terms of HFS on the site; old version)

Dwarf Therapist!

You can sort all dwarves by skills. If they have important skills, like being a legendary armorsmith, make them the only armorsmith in your fortress.

Everyone else who has skills you don't care about can just be farmers. They do your planting, butchering, tanning, milling, brewing, etc. Also furnace working. Most of your fortress will probably end up as farmers, and you can recruit from this pool to be your military.

To train them up just keep them growing plump helmets! Build two 10x10 fields, so you have 200 spaces of farmland. Grow plump helmets all year around. The extras will just rot in the field but thats fine, they create no miasma. They will skill up extremely quickly doing this.

Either that, or build a bunch of pumps.

[RandomNumberGenerator]

I actually like having 2-3 skilled farmers/cooks/brewers, because they produce higher-quality stuff that makes my dwarves happier. Generally I just press extra dwarves into the military, and set the rest to be masons spamming stone blocks. Eventually I build some sort of castle thing ont he surface with all the blocks when my stockpiles clutter up my stores.

[Wirevix]

I also have yet to get the knack of handling it cool when migrants start arriving.  Especially with the insane mega-migrant-waves in the new version, where fortress populations tend to explode early on.  'Course, the past few times I've made some rather large mistakes in irrigating my farm (such as forgetting to bottleneck the water pressure and filling the entire room to 7/7, which then had to be pumped out...) so the extra migrants are taken care of by the cold hand of starvation.  : B